you can reach what 20 maybe 23 keys on
your gaming keyboard garbage get a load of this the azeron
cyborg puts over a hundred keybindings and macros at your literal fingertips
with up to one two three four five six functions per finger you are gonna need
a bigger action bar still not enough for you how about Unlimited Custom profiles
endlessly adjustable switch positions and whatever color scheme you want yeah
when I saw this thing I knew I had to
try it or rather pay someone else to try
it for me because as good as it sounds in theory to have 29 programmable
buttons within mere millimeters of my fingertips it can take weeks or even
months to overcome the Steep learning curve on a product like this to review
it properly and I don't want to drop my
rank but I will drop though is this segue to our sponsor War Thunder War
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foreign
truthfully nobody really wanted to daily Drive the cyborg but plut from the
writing team made the mistake of saying that looks kind of cool during our
weekly writers meeting so he was voluntold to take it home set it up and
game on it for a month so that we could give the Power Glove of the future a
fair Shake spoiler alert at the end of what ended up being actually two months
I offered it to him for free for real you can have it
and he won't take it which is troubling
for azeron but hold on it's probably not for the reasons you think and he did
find a lot of potential benefits if you're willing to unlearn what you have
learned the cyborg is hardly the first game board on the market everyone from
Belkin to Razer to Red Dragon has at least dabbled in the space but the main
differentiators are that unlike its competitors it has no support for wasd
movement it relies instead entirely on the thumbstick and unlike others it has
the ability to mold to your hand dramatically reducing the distance
between your fingers and your wide repertoire of abilities potions and
spells ploof plays a lot of first and third person shooters and while he's
much more accurate with a mouse than a thumbstick his left hand does
legitimately get tired from holding down forward or back for hours during a
lengthy gaming session with three school age kids I can hardly relate with these
problems or feel bad bad for him at all but it can be a legitimate issue
especially for people with accessibility concerns to represent FPS games then he
briefly tried valorent briefly more on that later but ended up logging most of
his Play Time In Dying Light too for a third person shooter he finished Leon's
second run in Resident Evil 2 remake then to make sure that we had a game
that benefits from a lot of key bindings he played a bunch of DOTA 2. first of
course though he had to set it up I mean it's not ergonomic if it doesn't fit in
your hand right they ship it with this little hex key and actually really nice
feeling aluminum driver handle that unfortunately
uses this non-standard freaking bit so you can't use anything else in it and
can't use it for anything else kind of a bummer you know what can be used for
anything though the LTT Screwdriver from lttstore.com we've got a lot of
adjustments here you got your length you
got your spread you got your angles here
okay so is that yeah that's locked lots
of adjustment on the thumb here and have it here here or here depending on the
length of your thumb even the thumb ARM has like a second hole so it can be out
farther Earth than this adjustment range okay this thumb one is a little funky
very 3D printed in terms of build quality I don't mean
that as like an insult it just is oh my God yeah I can see why this took
you so long to configure man literally took me at least a half hour now that
it's dialed in it's actually like pretty darn comfortable this feels good but one
thing to note is that they actually have a compact version that instead of having
these scorpion tail style switches for the uh fingernails actually has a button
on the tops of these towers and I think that floof and I are on the same page
when I say that we would probably prefer that yeah yeah let's start with the
thumbsticks using a stick for wasd is hardly a new idea and has some very real
world benefits especially when it comes to comfort but there are situations
particularly for PC gaming where the keyboard is still King the problem with
a thumbstick like this is twofold you can't press multiple opposite directions
at once and it's not as easy to hit the
exact Direction you need this first problem is basically why ploof couldn't
play valorent or Counter-Strike or any competitive shooter with this thing want
to get into a strafe battle I mean you can but good luck want to stop on a dime
by inputting the opposite direction while holding your current direction not
happening ploof managed to finish just one match of valorent before he
completely gave up on it and I can definitely see why as for problem number
two it can't really pull d-pad Duty wasd
can at least kind of act like a d-pad allowing you to activate each Direction
individually and this is the kind of thing that mostly doesn't matter I mean
thumbsticks are superior to d-pads in many ways but in Resident Evil 2 for
example the d-pad is used in a number of puzzles and for things like lock
combination entry and we ran into many situations like the statue medallions in
the police station where accuracy became a problem because of how easy it was to
accidentally hit left or right when trying to go up or down there is this
little nub in here that you could rebind to wasd depending on which version of
the cyborg you get but isn't all that comfortable to reach even for my tiny
baby hands our last point about the joystick isn't specific to the cyborg
but it is something to keep in mind because nearly all joysticks have a
sizable dead zone or an area where they move but don't register an input they
can feel pretty unresponsive compared to a high quality keyboard with a clear
tactile actuation point and this can make fine adjustments to character
position a little bit challenging which comically resulted in ploof walking into
a lot of door frames and walls user error absolutely but the bottom line is
that he missed his keyboard in Resident Evil 2. with that being said he loved
having the cyborg In Dying Light too because you're almost constantly holding
forward while parkouring through the city unfortunately though this game is
where the cracks started to show in the software for someone who doesn't want to
use a keyboard but wants to keep their Mouse the cyborg is a dream come true I
mean 29 programmable buttons a profile
for every game mwah but
that's also its biggest problem sometimes your main profile right the
one that's just on there by default is going to work perfectly with a new game
right out of the box but because of the non-standardization of controls on PC a
lot of the time it won't In Dying Light 2 for example Z is your hand glider H is
heel m is map and C is Crouch so wait
now the control key that you had mapped for Crouch and CS go doesn't work in
this game and bloody hell where's the gym app Z again if you're the kind of
gamer you know who you are who plays that game just that one game this might
not be a problem for you but if variety is the spice of your life
the cyborg may feel a little bit like the next day on the toilet I mean to be
clear azeron's software was pretty intuitive and bug-free it supports an
unlimited number of profiles and can store two of them on board for gaming
events and the like but this sky's the limit flexibility can also take the joy
out of just sitting down to game for a bit when each
and every game you play requires going through this process where you launch it
check the default key bindings Tab out of the game double check your azeron
profile bindings cross reference the two accounting for any new functions that
this game might have that the last one didn't then go back into the game test
drive it a bit tune it and then finally
begin the process of committing that profile to your muscle memory and the
worst part is that while this does get easier over time
you've put in literally dozens of hours on this thing I'm giving you credit for it because you
really took one for the team there even for the games you play regularly there's
always going to be a small learning curve when you take a break maybe your
friends went on vacation and you haven't touched Dying Light too for a few weeks
uh prompt comes up and it's labeled as a key that you mapped it to
can you remember where Q is on the cyborg in this profile
maybe but more likely you're going to end up leaving the software with the
profile map up on a second screen so that you can reference it which is
pretty immersion breaking compared to how naturally I suspect most of us would
use a keyboard or a controller there are some shortcuts to this profiles for
example can be imported or exported and these surprisingly Vibrant Community
around the cyborg has created profiles for many of the most popular games but
as with the steam controller this isn't the Silver Bullet that you might hope it
would be either and Dota 2 presented us with a fresh problem ploof ended up
having to make custom profiles not just for the game but also for different
Heroes depending on the usual items he bought and their number of abilities to
be clear once it was all set up and working he actually loved having
everything at his fingertips like this but the ability to just on a whim click
on a different hero and say yes I'm gonna play as you this match was
kind of gone you can pay for re-wasd which will apparently detect the game
that you launch and swap profiles for you automatically it's a nice little
quality of life thing but it's gonna cost you another 25 dollars for that
functionality at the time of writing and it doesn't solve the every hero needs a
different binding problem only the I play a lot of different games one but
hey at least it's comfortable right well about that we found that over long
periods of time it was a bit of a mixed bag the shape is actually quite Pleasant
after adjusting it and you can get the Palm rest in a couple of different styles with the curved one being right
I'd say for for both of us the Omron d2f01 switches are not too hard to press
and have a nice clicky sound and while
you can fumble during some more intense sessions overall it does feel kind of
right to just rest your hand in this other hand however something about the
plastic material used for the switches particularly the bottom ones that your
fingers rest in feels distinctly greasy
after as little as 20 or 30 minutes and honestly when ploof told me this I
thought he might just be being a whiny pants about it like seriously dude tired
from holding down W for too long
but for this one after a few minutes I can actually kind of see what he means
before I'm on azeron's website has a guide about using lizard skin on the
switches and then you can buy grip tape for the Palm rest from azeron directly
so it's not like these problems aren't solvable but it's just yet another thing
to faff about with and pay more money for it to have a non-slippery experience
and remember that all of this cost is on top of whatever mouse and keyboard you
already have because this is not a full replacement for
either of them so you can't exactly just sell them to recoup some cost unless you
plan to just use the default name for every character in every game from now
on I mean I suppose it would be an option to get two of them for a total of
58 programmable Keys plus additional layers and like type on them but unless
you're used to similar systems like the data hand personal I would strongly
recommend against it I think the more obvious benefit of that right hand
version is that it could be great for Southpaw Gamers who are notoriously
underserved by existing keyboard options and even if you're not a southpaw gamer
it could could be great for you I don't want this to come across harsh or overly
critical especially because the product does do what it says on the tin and they
certainly have a lot of happy customers it's just that it is our job to make
sure that you're up to speed on the potential downsides before you commit
the desk space money and I'd say most
importantly time that it takes to adopt a peripheral like this into your gaming
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signing up thank you for watching if you liked this video make sure to check out
that data hand video we made last year that one is meant to replace your
keyboard but has an even steeper
learning curve